South Asian Media Briefing Workshop on Climate Change, 2009

New Delhi, August 27-28, 2009

Over 120 journalists, representing seven South Asian countries, recently came together at New Delhi’s India Habitat Centre to receive a briefing on climate change: its science, impacts, mitigation strategies, politics and global negotiations.

The South Asian Media Briefing Workshop on Climate Change, as the meeting was called, was organized by CSE’s Media Resource Centre.

The two-day Workshop was aimed at providing first-hand information on and understanding of the subject to journalists, straight from the key women and men in the field – the national negotiators, policy-makers, climate change experts, and civil society representatives. Journalists from Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka attended the event.

Among the key speakers and presenters were Sunita Narain, director, CSE, who presented an overview of the issues and moderated most of the discussions; Shailesh Nayak, secretary, Ministry of earth sciences, who chaired the session on science and impacts of climate change; Shyam Saran, prime minister’s special envoy on climate change who spoke on the north-south divide; J M Mauskar, additional secretary, Ministry of environment and forests; Farrukh Iqbal Khan, director, UN (II), Ministry of foreign affairs, Government of Pakistan; and Jairam Ramesh, the minister of state (independent charge) for environment and forests (see Workshop Programme for complete list of speakers).

CSE’s climate change portal and blog were launched on this occasion. A primer on climate change was also released and distributed among the participants. Photographs and video footages of the event are available on request. For details, please get in touch with Souparno Banerjee, coordinator, Media Resource Centre, CSE on souparno@cseindia.org